Simple Music Secrets

Our voices are the most fragile musical instruments you can imagine. Every day, we use our voices for much more than singing, and our bodies endure conditions and stressors that can deteriorate our voice quality, if we don’t take measures to protect it from harm.

Factors That Can Affect Your Voice
Weather conditions, second-hand smoke, noisy environments, what we eat and drink, coughing, clearing your throat, medications, allergies – the list of things that can directly or indirectly impact your voice is numerous.

You certainly can’t stay in a bubble or prevent exposure to everything that might affect your voice, but the best way to manage these individual hazards is to think of your overall health and take precautions whenever possible to protect your voice.

Protect Your Voice, Water It
The basics for your body’s health also apply to your voice. Water is a singer’s best ally, since it provides natural hydration without taking vital fluid out of your system in digestion. Staying hydrated during hot weather in summer and dry conditions in winter while indoors are especially important. Cool-mist humidifiers can keep the indoor humidity at a comfortable level in winter.
The vocal folds within your larynx are, in effect, small muscles that need to be conditioned and exercised with caution to build their strength without damage. They also need to be well lubricated. Drinking water steadily over the course of every day helps maintain the right density of water in your tissues, including your throat and this tip alone will help to protect your voice dramatically.

Steam is also healthy for the outside of the vocal folds in your throat. Some vocal experts recommend taking a hot shower or using a hot vaporizer for a few minutes twice a day to generate some much-needed moisture for your vocal chords.

Keeping your instrument clean is a very important part of being a musician. Dirt and grime can build up on any instrument, affecting the sound of your music. Because it is such a long instrument, cleaning a trombone can be a challenge. But keeping a trombone clean is crucial, especially in the slide area. Build up in the slide can make it hard to play. Here are some steps to clean your trombone.

The first step to take in cleaning a trombone is to fill your tub with lukewarm water. Do not use hot water, as it will damage the finish of your instrument. Fill the tub to about seven inches, and add a cup of mild liquid soap.

Do not use harsh soap as it can damage the finish on your trombone. Place a layer of thick towels on the bottom of the tub. They will absorb some of the water, but this is an essential step to cleaning a trombone as it will protect the instrument from the hard surface of the bathtub.

The next step is to place the trombone into the water to soak. This is an important step in cleaning a trombone, because this soaking will loosen up the debris inside the instrument. If you want, you can take the instrument apart during this soaking. It is imperative that the water reaches all the parts of the instrument. Allow the instrument to soak for at least four hours. You can leave it over night if you prefer.

After the instrument is done soaking, take all of the tubing outside. Take your garden hose and put a sprayer attachment on it. Wrap a towel around the sprayer to make it soft, and put it into the bell of the trombone. Spray a strong stream of water into the instrument to flush out the debris. Some dirt will remain lodged in the trombone, so to finish cleaning it, take a snake brush and loosen the dirt, then flush the instrument again.

The next step in cleaning a trombone is crucial. You must rinse, dry, and oil all parts. Do not leave water in the instrument, as it can induce mold or rust. After drying and oiling your instrument, reassemble it. This intense level cleaning should be done once a year. Not only will it increase the life of your instrument, but it will also remove bacteria from the instrument, which will make you healthier.

Just as learning your scales or practicing is mandatory, so is the care of your instrument.

Cleaning a Trombone

http://simplemusicsecrets.com/cleaning-a-trombone.html

I wanted to speak to all the guitar players out there who have always wanted to learn say, Carlos Santana or Chuck Berry or many other great guitar solos exactly as they were played.

There are a few tools on the market that help with this and one is called “Guitar Leads”. You can read about it on the site here:

Guitar Leads Review

When I was a teenager and wanted to play the exact Clapton or Hendrix lead riff I would spend hours with a record and struggle to play it over and over. There was no capability to slow it down unless you could afford a reel to reel tape player. If you could slow the record down it was to 16 1/2 r p ms and now it sounded like Darth Vader underwater.

Now you can slow it down and still hear it in pitch.

Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.
The research by Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park is currently in press at the journal Brain and Cognition.

“We were interested in how individuals who are naturally creative look at problems that are best solved by thinking ‘out of the box’,” Folley said. “We studied musicians because creative thinking is part of their daily experience, and we found that there were qualitative differences in the types of answers they gave to problems and in their associated brain activity.”

One possible explanation the researchers offer for the musicians’ elevated use of both brain hemispheres is that many musicians must be able to use both hands independently to play their instruments.

“Musicians may be particularly good at efficiently accessing and integrating competing information from both hemispheres,” Folley said. “Instrumental musicians often integrate different melodic lines with both hands into a single musical piece, and they have to be very good at simultaneously reading the musical symbols, which are like left-hemisphere-based language, and integrating the written music with their own interpretation, which has been linked to the right hemisphere.”

Previous studies of creativity have focused on divergent thinking, which is the ability to come up with new solutions to open-ended, multifaceted problems. Highly creative individuals often display more divergent thinking than their less creative counterparts.

To conduct the study, the researchers recruited 20 classical music students from the Vanderbilt Blair School of Music and 20 non-musicians from a Vanderbilt introductory psychology course. The musicians each had at least eight years of training. The instruments they played included the piano, woodwind, string and percussion instruments. The groups were matched based on age, gender, education, sex, high school grades and SAT scores.

The researchers conducted two experiments to compare the creative thinking processes of the musicians and the control subjects. In the first experiment, the researchers showed the research subjects a variety of household objects and asked them to make up new functions for them, and also gave them a written word association test. The musicians gave more correct responses than non-musicians on the word association test, which the researchers believe may be attributed to enhanced verbal ability among musicians. The musicians also suggested more novel uses for the household objects than their non-musical counterparts.

In the second experiment, the two groups again were asked to identify new uses for everyday objects as well as to perform a basic control task while the activity in their prefrontal lobes was monitored using a brain scanning technique called near-infrared spectroscopy, or NIRS. NIRS measures changes in blood oxygenation in the cortex while an individual is performing a cognitive task.

“When we measured subjects’ prefrontal cortical activity while completing the alternate uses task, we found that trained musicians had greater activity in both sides of their frontal lobes. Because we equated musicians and non-musicians in terms of their performance, this finding was not simply due to the musicians inventing more uses;  there seems to be a qualitative difference in how they think about this information,” Folley said.

The researchers also found that, overall, the musicians had higher IQ scores than the non-musicians, supporting recent studies that intensive musical training is associated with an elevated IQ score.

Source: Vanderbilt University

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The full version of this story is available online at http://www.physorg.com/news142185056.html

Lately I have been thinking about what methods I use to memorize songs. I am a guitar player and singer so I play the song on the guitar endlessly until the song can play naturally without me having to remember it per se.

I break it into sections, intro, stanzas or verses and ending. Your particular song may be in a different form but the concept is the same.

I try it in different keys to find the best key for my voice and also differrent keys on the guitar require different techniques and may provide me with insight or inspiration. Sometimes you find things you would not have thought of before simply by playing in a different key.

I find that if there are particular sections that are difficult or have a challenge of some sort that I need to work on this section first in my practice. This makes sure I do not overlook it and get lazy. If I always play through the song and stop when I get to the “hard” part then I will not ever get past it and it will actually become part of the final version. You must face yoru demons and work on the hard part.

Oh and the last part is to remind you that there are no shortcuts really. You have to play the song over and over and over and over and over…….